Reading Scripture to Survive: Reflections on the Ministry of Richard Hays

Beginning this weekend, my church will host my New Testament seminary professor Richard Hays, from Duke Divinity School for Sunday worship and our Healing the Brokenness Conference luncheon on Monday (sign up here). It is rare for professors to keep up with their “B” students and even more rare for them to be ready to spend a couple of their days investing in their students’ attempts at ministry. In Richard Hays participating in the life of Pleasant Hill, two ministries are coming together that forever transformed my life and faith. In preparing to host Dr. Hays, I am rereading his books The Moral Vision of the New Testament and The Art of Reading Scripture, and his writings are reminding me once again why I am so thankful that God allowed me to participate in Hays’ ministry through the Duke Divinity School.

In reflecting on Hays’ lectures, writings and life, I am reminded of Augustine’s beautiful insight: “Now a person is all the more or the less able to speak wisely, the more or less progress he has made in the Holy Scriptures.” “I don’t mean just in reading them frequently and committing them to memory,” Augustine clarifies, “but in understanding them well and diligently exploring their senses… seeing into the heart of them with the eyes of their own hearts.” The quality of Scripture reading, for Augustine, is not primarily about mental capacities but about hearts rightly formed and lives well lived through the power of God’s Holy Spirit. Such is the nature of dealing with God’s words.

Strangely, even unbelievers know that when Christians’ lives are formed more by pride, greed and lust rather than by humility, generosity and love, something has gone badly wrong with the believers’ reading of Scripture. It takes quite an incredible book for even those who reject it to often believe that its words possess the power to truthfully judge our lives. Perhaps one thing many believers and nonbelievers agree on is that the ability to read Scripture well is somehow intimately intertwined with a conversion to a more truthful way of living. In fact, the failure to witness transformed lives and witnessing instead the dissonance between the Bible’s teaching and Christian living has acted as a foundation for well-founded doubts about the faith.

And it is this dynamic relationship between reading and lived life that has provided awkward relationships between the Scriptures and Scripture’s interpreters in the life of the church. As the world became sophisticated in the wake of the Enlightenment, many scholars and ministers believed that the foundation of disbelief was scientific in nature, that the modern world simply matured past uncritical acceptance of the world of Scripture with its miracles and its tall tales of seas opening, prophets in the bellies of whales, and dead folks raising again. The modern prophets of Western Christianity, both liberal and conservative, said that the church and her proclamation of the Gospel needed to be as sophisticated as the world in which she lived and better adapt itself to the worldview and priorities of a new age so that Christianity could remain relevant, respectable and dominant.

Scholars hit their books; the preachers took to their pulpits, and some ministries even rushed to buy specialized light-systems and fog machines to secure Christianity’s place in our world. And though liberals and conservatives of various traditions did it in their own ways, all too often both participated in the tragedy that reversed the order of conversion by making the Gospel look more like their audience rather than attempting ministries that made their audience look more like their Gospel. As the conversion process necessary to make Jesus relevant gained precision; whether one was a Democrat or Republican, a hippie or a CEO, or even if one preferred preachers who wore Hawaiian shirts with flip flops to complement bleached hair, we could find a church capable of complimenting our political and cultural convictions. No conversion necessary. Naturally, the more Jesus began to look like us, the better we felt we knew Him. Of course, once Jesus became a staunch Republican or Democrat, yuppie or hippie, the less clear it became why He or His church mattered.

By the time I took Dr. Hays’ Introductory New Testament course in 2002, our class represented, in many ways, children from modernity’s final chapter who had a Holy Spirit thirst for more of Jesus than what most American churches sold. Dr. Hays provided us a teacher who combined a poet’s gift of words with a scholar’s keen mind, a disciple’s heart and a childlike thirst and openness to the mysteries of God. He attempted to teach us the patience to listen carefully to Scripture’s story before assuming we knew it and to allow what we patiently heard to question what we previously assumed. Hays attempted to ingrain in us a vulnerable style of reading that allowed Scriptures to question the very fabric of our lives rather than a thin reading that simply sought to sow our faith into our the preapproved patterns of our culture. He helped us to read Scripture in the company of the church’s greatest readers and interpreters so that we would never be alone or limited to our own devices. And though he listened to Scripture’s critics, he never found their cynicism more interesting or truthful than the wild hopes expressed in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’s accounts. He taught us the Scriptures as texts he loved more than texts he mastered and in so doing opened our eyes to better appreciate how well Scriptures’ writers crafted their stories through “well-wrought tales” that were anything but fiction.

Through a book many of us thought we already knew, Hays opened a world that is more truthfully known through crucifixion and resurrection, sin and forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, mercy and grace than a world limited to closed system of cause and effect directed by those empowered with the best marketing departments. Hays attempted to show how, at least in some ways, children often see the world more truthfully than their parents precisely because they have not assumed to know how the world runs nor the limits of what is possible with God. And it is impossible to read the Bible well without opening ourselves to its transformative possibilities.

In my living room’s bookcase, I have the Bible my grandpa used for his daily devotional for over forty years. Brown duct tape holds together its fragile binding, and its binding holds together pages that are well tattered and torn. Grandpa dropped out of middle school in the great-depression following his father’s death, and so he didn’t learn to read Scripture from a divinity school or to stockpile information to pontificate in intellectual debates. He read Scripture to live a life worthy of enduring the challenges life brought his way. I do not know if I can read Scripture as well as my grandfather, but I do believe that I read it better now than I did before I met Richard Hays. For this I am deeply grateful for Hays’ ministry; for despite my education, I too need Scripture to survive.